Many sporting stars can blame their decline on the bottle. Few, however, can attribute their crowning glory to it. Rachel Heyhoe-Flint is one, though. Heyhoe-Flint captained the England team that won the first Women's Cricket World Cup in 1973, and even to this day is synonymous with the sport. Yet her greatest achievement would never have happened had she not once shared a bottle of "very good brandy" with "Union" Jack Hayward, the Bahamas-based property developer.

"The women's game was still amateur in the late 1960s and heavily dependent on patronage and charitable donations," explains Heyhoe-Flint. "None of us had any money. I was working as a journalist at the Wolverhampton Express and Star, and the librarian there suggested I wrote to the Hayward family, who were from the town and well-known for helping ailing causes. So I penned a letter to Jack's father Charles, but by all accounts it was screwed up and thrown in the bin, because he wasn't interested in sport. Luckily, his secretary fished it out and gave it to Jack, because she knew he likes both women and cricket! He knew my name from reading my reports in the paper, and so he came to sponsor two England tours of the West Indies.

"After the second one in 1971, I was staying in Sussex with Jack and his wife. After supper we started having a little slurp of brandy, and as the level went down the bottle, Jack suddenly said, 'Why don't we have a World Cup of women's cricket?', and that he would pay for it. I put the idea to the governing body, he sponsored the whole event, and it was as simple as that!"

Seven teams contested the inaugural tournament: England, Young England, Australia, New Zealand, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and an International XI designed to allow in some players from South Africa, then banned from international competition. England and Australia were favourites to emerge from a round-robin league to contest the final, and that scenario would come to pass - though England didn't have the easiest of rides along the way.

"I always say I was never defeated as an England captain," says Heyhoe-Flint, "but when we played New Zealand at Exmouth, a technicality occurred in that a sea fret came in. Suddenly, unlike today's very cultured Duckworth-Lewis method, our target was raised, quite ridiculously, from needing 106 in 35 overs to us requiring 106 in 15! So New Zealand beat us on a weather technicality."

In the final, however, Australia were unable to rain on England's parade. At a sunny Edgbaston, Heyhoe-Flint won the toss and chose to bat. "It was covered as a news sports item by ITV and the BBC, but it wasn't covered ball by ball," she recalls. "There was still pressure, though. I took four overs to get off the mark, I was so nervous. Apparently my husband was walking behind the pavilion, he couldn't bear to look. He kept bumping into lots of our friends, all of whom were similarly nervous."

There was no need to worry: Enid Bakewell and Lynne Thomas put on an opening stand of 101, Bakewell went on to make 118, Heyhoe-Flint made a half- century, and after 60 overs England had posted a score of 279 for three. Australia could only reply with 187 for nine, England winning the trophy by 92 runs. "It was unusually one-sided," admits the triumphant captain. "We never had matches at Test level when we creamed our way through like that."

Prime Minister Edward Heath held a reception for all seven teams - "There were all these tourists wondering what all these women were doing streaming in and out of Downing Street with a bachelor prime minister!" - and Heyhoe-Flint became a star, appearing on chat shows, radio panels, and A Question of Sport. "I wasn't doing it to raise my profile," insists Heyhoe-Flint, "I was doing it to raise the profile of women's cricket." But cricket's suits didn't see it that way. And before the following World Cup, in 1978 in India, Heyhoe-Flint was dropped from the squad, despite having topped the batting averages that summer, never having been defeated as an England captain, and doing more than her fair share to generate sponsorship for the game.

"I don't hold any bitterness now," she says, "but it was curious at the time. The only answer I got was that it was a 'committee decision'. I think one or two officials became a little disenchanted with the attention I was getting. One comment after I was dropped said: we acknowledge that she has done a lot for the women's cricket association - but she is not the women's cricket association."

Such a ludicrous decision would be unheard of today. "England have every chance indeed this year, [the 2009 tournament started yesterday] as they have all the benefits of terrific back-up," says Heyhoe-Flint. "We were incredibly amateur amateurs, in that after the match finished we'd pack our stuff in the car and drive off back to the homestead and then went into the office, or the school, or the factory and went back to work the next day. Nowadays - and I don't resent it in the slightest - they are semi-professionals and they deserve it." Union Jack would doubtless drink to that.